COHEN 185I had attended several meetings with Morton Kramer, chief of the
Biometrics Branch, and was deeply impressed by the pertinence and
quality of his reports. Donald Bloch, from the Lodge staff, had enlisted
in the PHS’s Commissioned Corps and was working in the office of
Joseph Bobbitt, chief of the Professional Services Branch.
Wade H. Marshall, chief of the NIMH-NINDB Laboratory of Neu
rophysiology, his wife Louise Hanson, my late first wife, Mabel Blake,
and I had worked together for more than four years in the Physiology
Department of the University of Chicago, and we had taken Ph.D.s
within several months of each other in the mid-1930s.
I knew of the early work of John Clausen from the Illinois Institute
for Juvenile Research in Chicago, where I had served as Senior Fellow in
1939-1940. He was now chief of the NIMH’s Laboratory of Socio-
Environmental Studies, working out of the Public Health Center in
Hagerstown, Maryland.
And everyone with even a remote interest in physiology knew of
Seymour S. Kety’s development of a method to measure directly the
metabolism of the human brain.
My sole reservation about the NIMH offer was the restriction of
supergrade appointments. I believed that the government’s taking re
sponsibility for a widespread human problem was socially very desirable
but I did not relish the prospect of rushing to create a functioning, world-
class 100-bed research institute with only one senior person supervising a
newly formed group of young men and women who had never worked
together before. This was to be within the larger setting of a 500-bed
hospital similarly constituted. I called Felix and declined his offer.
But my conflict was obvious. A week later Felix called to say that he
could offer me three additional senior, supergrade positions. In addition
to their studies at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute–where by fiat
only M.D.s could participate–all of the Lodge’s senior staff were engaged
in taking and/or presenting courses with social and biological scientists
in the Washington School of Psychiatry. Prominent in this group was
David McKenzie Rioch who had left his position as professor of neuro
psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis to come to the Lodge
because of his interest in the work of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and